History > 2015 > USA > Justice > Death Penalty (II)

Cruel and Unusual Punishments

Before the Supreme Court

OCT. 13, 2015

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

On Tuesday the Supreme Court heard cases involving the two most extreme punishments in the American criminal justice system: life without the possibility of parole and the death penalty.

The capital case comes to the justices, as it often does, from Florida. Only last year the court struck down the state’s rigid, unscientific law that tried to skirt around the court’s ban on executing intellectually disabled people.

This time the issue is the jury’s role in capital sentencing. Florida, alone among the states and the federal government, allows a non-unanimous jury to vote for a death sentence — which is why a man named Timothy Lee Hurst sits on the state’s death row even though five of the 12 jurors in his case voted against the death penalty. Mr. Hurst’s situation is common: According to one study, if Florida required unanimity, there would have been 70 percent fewer death sentences handed down since 2010.

In a questionable 1972 case, the Supreme Court required jury unanimity in federal criminal trials, but not in state trials. Mr. Hurst’s lawyer, Seth Waxman, argued to overturn that ruling, “particularly in the Eighth Amendment context where the question is death.” If unanimous verdicts are required in federal criminal cases, even those with modest penalties, it is grossly unjust that a state can carry out executions with divided juries. It is past time for the court to review and overturn the 1972 ruling.

Florida law also relegates the jury in a capital case to an advisory role, and leaves to the judge the final decision on whether to impose a death sentence. It is hard to see how this does not violate a 2002 Supreme Court ruling that juries, and not judges, must find an “aggravating” factor — like a crime was especially heinous — when a state imposes a death sentence.

Florida’s solicitor general, Allen Winsor, argued to the justices that the 2002 case required the jury to decide whether someone was eligible for execution, not to impose the sentence. But that distinction is meaningless, especially where the jury’s decision is not unanimous. Once again, Florida is dodging a clear Supreme Court ruling with legal trickery. The justices should not tolerate it.

In the other case argued Tuesday, the justices are considering whether their 2012 decision banning mandatory sentences of life without parole for juveniles convicted of homicide should apply to as many as 2,000 people who were already in prison serving such mandatory sentences when the court ruled. This may seem like an odd question, since the basis of that opinion, Miller v. Alabama, was that young people are both less culpable than adults and more likely to be able to change over time. By that measure, a juvenile sentenced before the court’s decision is obviously no different from one sentenced after.

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The plaintiff in the current case, Henry Montgomery, is a 69-year-old man who was 17 when he was convicted of killing a Louisiana sheriff’s deputy in 1963 — a crime that carried an automatic sentence of life without the possibility of parole. He has been imprisoned for more than 50 years at the Louisiana State Penitentiary and has been by all accounts a well-behaved prisoner.

Although the issue sounds straightforward, the court’s approach to deciding whether its decisions are retroactive is complex, and as a result, state and federal courts have been divided on the effect of the Miller ruling.

Lawyers for Louisiana argued that because the court did not ban life without parole for juveniles convicted of homicide in all cases but only as a mandatory sentence, the 2012 ruling need not be applied retroactively.

This is too narrow a reading of the reasoning behind the Miller decision. Like the court’s earlier decisions banning the death penalty for juveniles and life without parole for juveniles for non-homicide crimes, the Miller ruling was based on a fundamental observation that juveniles are different from adults, and it required courts to take age into consideration when imposing a sentence.

The Montgomery case gives the justices an opportunity to consider the broader question: Does life without parole for juveniles violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments? The only just and humane response is yes.

Fifteen states, along with the District of Columbia, have already eliminated the punishment entirely. Nine of those states have done so in the three years since the Miller ruling. And more than a dozen other states have five or fewer inmates serving that sentence, which is a good indication of how bizarre it is.

A ruling that the Miller decision should be applied retroactively — or one that banned life without parole categorically for juveniles — would allow inmates sentenced as juveniles to get a chance at some point to show a judge or parole board that they have earned the right to return to society.

People can change, and any justice system that is not merely about retribution would recognize that. A sentence of life without parole is particularly senseless when it comes to juveniles, whom the court has already found to have a greater capacity for transformation.

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A version of this editorial appears in print on October 14, 2015, on page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: Cruel Punishments at the Court.

Cruel and Unusual Punishments Before the Supreme Court,
NYT,
OCT. 13, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/14/opinion/
cruel-and-unusual-punishments-before-the-supreme-court.html

Justices Question Florida’s

Death Penalty System

OCT. 13, 2015

The New York Times

By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — Florida’s idiosyncratic capital sentencing system appeared to be in peril at the Supreme Court on Tuesday, with several justices questioning whether it gives enough authority to jurors.

A second argument on Tuesday, about whether a 2012 ruling barring mandatory life sentences for juvenile offenders can be applied retroactively, devolved into a tangled discussion on a jurisdictional issue that may derail a ruling in the case.

The first case, Hurst v. Florida, No. 14-7505, concerned Timothy Lee Hurst, who was convicted of the 1998 murder of Cynthia Lee Harrison, a co-worker at a Popeyes restaurant in Escambia County, Fla. He was tried and sentenced to death in 2000.

After the Florida Supreme Court ordered him resentenced, a second jury in 2012 recommended a death sentence by a 7-to-5 vote. The judge then independently considered the evidence concerning the appropriate punishment and concluded that Mr. Hurst should be executed.

Seth P. Waxman, a lawyer for Mr. Hurst, listed what he said were several constitutional problems with Florida’s procedure. The jury was not required to render a unanimous verdict, to specify which factors warranted death or even to say whether the jurors in the majority agreed on which factors they had relied on, Mr. Waxman said.

“There is no other state that permits anyone to be sentenced to death other than by a unanimous determination by the jury,” he said. “And the State of Florida requires unanimity for shoplifting, just not for death.”

Only two states — Louisiana and Oregon — allow nonunanimous verdicts in most criminal cases, and even then at least 10 of the 12 jurors have to agree. The two states require unanimous verdicts in capital cases.

The Supreme Court upheld Oregon’s approach in 1972. On Tuesday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested that the court should consider overruling that decision.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that would not be necessary to rule against Florida in the case before the justices. “Does 10 to 2 automatically mean that 7 to 5 is O.K.?” she asked Allen Winsor, Florida’s solicitor general.

Mr. Winsor said a simple majority vote was acceptable thanks to another challenged feature of Florida’s approach. “Even if it’s a 7-to-5 vote, you still have the judge coming behind that jury” to make the final determination, he said.

But in 2002, in Ring v. Arizona, the Supreme Court ruled that juries and not judges must make the factual findings to support death sentences. Mr. Winsor said the state’s procedure satisfied Ring because juries did make the required threshold determination that the defendant was eligible to be executed.

Justice Elena Kagan disagreed. “The crucial death eligibility determination is being made by the judge because that’s the only death eligibility determination that the appeals court is ever going to review,” she said.

The argument in the second case Tuesday, Montgomery v. Louisiana, No. 14-280, was notable for how little time the justices spent on its central question: whether their 2012 decision barring mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juvenile killers must be applied retroactively. Instead, they wondered whether they had the authority to decide the case at all.

The case concerns Henry Montgomery, who was 17 in 1963 when he murdered an East Baton Rouge police officer. He is now 69.

There are some 2,000 people serving sentences of life without parole for murders they committed when they were not yet 18. Many of them received those sentences automatically, without individualized consideration of their youth and other factors.

In the 2012 decision, Miller v. Alabama, the Supreme Court ruled that such automatic life sentences for juvenile offenders violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Life-without-parole sentences remained permissible, the court said, but only after individualized consideration. But the court did not say whether the decision was merely prospective or whether it required new sentencing hearings or other review for offenders whose sentences were already final.

The decision followed two others concerning harsh penalties imposed on juvenile offenders. In 2005 in Roper v. Simmons, the court eliminated the juvenile death penalty. In 2010 in Graham v. Florida, the court ruled that sentencing juvenile offenders to life without the possibility of parole was also unconstitutional, but only for crimes that did not involve killings.

S. Kyle Duncan, a lawyer for Louisiana, said those decisions could apply retroactively “because the state no longer can impose that category of penalty.” The case before the justices is different, he said, because juvenile killers are still eligible for life-without-parole sentences after their cases are considered individually.

According to the Sentencing Project, a Washington research group that favors more liberal sentencing policies, 14 state Supreme Courts have ruled that the Miller decision applies retroactively while seven have said the opposite. Six states have passed juvenile sentencing legislation that applied retroactivity.

Mark D. Plaisance, a lawyer for Mr. Montgomery, was barely able to address the question of retroactivity. Instead, the justices questioned him about whether they had jurisdiction to review a ruling from the Louisiana Supreme Court saying that their Miller ruling applied only prospectively.

The Supreme Court has no power to review state courts’ conclusions based purely on state law. Though the state Supreme Court in Tuesday’s case referred to a federal framework in considering retroactivity, some justices said that was both discretionary and provisional.

Because both sides agreed that the Supreme Court had jurisdiction to hear the case, the justices appointed Richard D. Bernstein to argue the opposite position. Several justices seemed persuaded by his suggestion that the court should await a case on the same issue arising from a federal challenge to a life-without-parole sentence.

Michael R. Dreeben, a deputy solicitor general, urged the court to act in the case before it. He said the Miller decision was precisely the sort of precedent that should be applied retroactively.

“The reasons why the court decided Miller,” he said, “had to do with the reduced culpability of youth and the capacity of youth to mature, change and achieve a degree of rehabilitation that is consistent with something less than the most harsh sentence available for youths who commit murder.”

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A version of this article appears in print on October 14, 2015, on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: Jury’s Role Questioned in Florida Capital Cases.

Justices Question Florida’s Death Penalty System,
NYT, OCT. 13, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/14/us/politics/
justices-question-floridas-death-penalty-system.html

States Scramble

for Drugs Used in Executions,

Causing Delays

OCT. 8, 2015

The New York Times

By MANNY FERNANDEZ

Despite a Supreme Court ruling allowing a controversial drug to be used for lethal injections in Oklahoma, death-penalty states are finding it harder to carry out executions as they struggle to obtain and properly use limited supplies of ever-changing combinations of suitable drugs.

Prison officials in Texas and Virginia have improvised a short-term solution by trading drugs used in lethal injections. Both Ohio and Nebraska have sought to buy a drug no longer available in the United States from overseas only to be told by the federal Food and Drug Administration that importing the drug is illegal.

Executions in Mississippi have been postponed for months over a federal lawsuit challenging the state’s three-drug protocol. The delay will stretch into next year, with a trial scheduled in July 2016. And in Montana on Tuesday, a judge blocked the state from carrying out executions, ruling that one of the two drugs it planned to use did not comply with the state law governing lethal injections. The only way Montana can resume executions with that drug, the judge said, is by having the State Legislature modify the law.

“Over time lethal injection has become only more problematic and chaotic,” said Deborah W. Denno, a professor at Fordham Law School and an expert on lethal injections.

Oklahoma last week halted the execution of Richard E. Glossip, who was part of the challenge the Supreme Court had turned down, after officials realized two hours before it was to take place that the state’s supplier had sent prison officials the wrong drug. The error, which led to a stay of all executions, had occurred at least once before. Oklahoma executed an inmate in January using that wrong drug — potassium acetate instead of the potassium chloride that is required under the state’s protocol. The use of potassium acetate in January is part of an investigation the Oklahoma attorney general is conducting in the aftermath of Mr. Glossip’s postponed execution.

“Until we have complete confidence in the system, we will delay any further executions,” Gov. Mary Fallin said in a statement.

In June, the Supreme Court ruled against Mr. Glossip and two other Oklahoma death-row inmates who argued that one of the drugs in the state’s three-drug protocol — midazolam, a short-acting sedative — was unreliable. But the court’s decision has had little impact, experts said. Several states appear to be reluctant to use midazolam in part because of its involvement in three high-profile executions in which prisoners appeared to suffer last year, in Oklahoma, Ohio and Arizona.

The apprehension over midazolam, combined with a drug shortage caused by manufacturers’ ceasing production or limiting how drugs can be used, has made it increasingly difficult for states to obtain drugs and carry out executions without delays, mistakes or controversies, and without pushing the legal limits of how drugs can be obtained.

The scramble for drugs has caused some states to embrace or consider more unusual or more antiquated ways of putting inmates to death.

In 2014, Tennessee authorized prison officials to use the electric chair if lethal-injection drugs were unavailable. Gov. Gary R. Herbert of Utah signed a bill into law in March approving firing squads when drugs cannot be obtained. In April, Oklahoma made nitrogen gas its new backup method. In Louisiana, where executions have been postponed following a federal lawsuit over its lethal-injection system, prison officials recommended in a report in February that nitrogen gas be adopted as an alternative method, through the use of a mask or other device but not a gas chamber.

Lethal injections in many of the nation’s 31 death-penalty states have become increasingly varied in the type, combination and source of drugs used. In January 2014, six executions were conducted in six states using four different protocols, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a group that opposes capital punishment.

In one of those cases, two drugs — midazolam and hydromorphone — were used together for the first time for an execution in the United States. The Ohio inmate who was injected with them in January 2014, Dennis McGuire, appeared to struggle for several minutes.

One year later, Ohio officials said they would no longer use the two-drug combination they had used on Mr. McGuire and postponed all executions planned for 2015 until they obtained new drugs. As it prepares to resume executions in 2016, Ohio’s search for new drugs earned it a warning from federal authorities, after prison officials explored buying a sedative, sodium thiopental, from overseas. In June, a Food and Drug Administration official told the state in a letter that “there is no F.D.A.-approved application for sodium thiopental, and it is illegal to import an unapproved new drug into the United States.”

Ohio officials declined to answer questions about the letter. JoEllen Smith, a spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, said the agency “continues to seek all legal means to obtain the drugs necessary to carry out court-ordered executions.”

In Nebraska, where proponents of the death penalty have been fighting a vote in May by state legislators to abolish capital punishment, prison officials ordered lethal-injection drugs from India but said they had not received them. A spokesman for the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services said hundreds of vials and capsules of sodium thiopental and pancuronium bromide were ordered at a cost of more than $50,000.

Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing the use of midazolam, Florida has been blocked for months in using it as part of its three-drug method because of legal challenges over midazolam raised by a death-row inmate, Jerry Correll. The Florida Supreme Court ruled against him on Friday.

In Texas, the execution of Michael Yowell in 2013 marked the first time the state had used a sedative known as pentobarbital that was made not by a drug manufacturer but by a compounding pharmacy. Such pharmacies are largely unregulated by the F.D.A. Texas changed its protocol from a three-drug cocktail to a single drug after its stock of one of the drugs expired and it was unable to obtain a new shipment.

Virginia found itself in a similar situation as it prepared to execute Alfredo R. Prieto last week for the murders of a Virginia couple in 1988. Virginia uses a three-drug combination that includes midazolam. The state’s stock of midazolam was set to expire, and officials were unable to obtain additional supplies, according to court documents. Virginia wanted another sedative, pentobarbital, and turned to Texas for help.

Texas prison officials donated three vials of pentobarbital to the Virginia Department of Corrections for Mr. Prieto’s execution, and two Virginia prison employees traveled to Texas in late August to bring the vials to Virginia, according to court papers. Texas was returning a favor: In 2013, Texas officials facing a shortage of pentobarbital were given the drug by Virginia.

“Even if the transactions between states do not comply with law, there is no recourse for death-sentenced prisoners,” said Megan McCracken, a lethal-injection expert with the Death Penalty Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. “Over the years, we have seen states obtain drugs for execution in ways that clearly do not comply with legal and regulatory frameworks.”

A spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said the supply of pentobarbital given to Virginia in August was legally purchased from a compounding pharmacy and tested for potency and purity. He said Texas law prohibited the agency from disclosing the supplier’s identity.

Lawyers for Mr. Prieto questioned the efficacy of the drug. Virginia officials argued that Texas has used compounded pentobarbital successfully in 24 executions in two years. A federal judge sided with Virginia, and allowed Mr. Prieto’s execution to proceed last week.

States Scramble for Drugs Used in Executions, Causing Delays,
NYT, OCT. 8, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/09/us/death-penalty-lethal-injection.html

Missouri Inmate

Is Spared Death Sentence

 

OCT. 2, 2015

The New York Times

By JOHN ELIGON

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A St. Louis-area man on death row for hiring someone to murder his former wife was spared execution on Friday when Missouri’s staunchly pro-death penalty governor commuted his sentence to life without parole.

The move by Gov. Jay Nixon came just four days before the man, Kimber Edwards, was to become the seventh person executed this year in Missouri, which leads the nation in executions per capita for 2014 and 2015. Mr. Nixon has commuted just one other death sentence since he became governor in 2009. Twenty inmates have been executed since then.

Lawyers for Mr. Edwards, 51, presented evidence that they said suggested he was innocent.

Orthell Wilson, the man who admitted to killing Mr. Edwards’s former wife, Kimberly Cantrell, in 2000, signed an affidavit this year, saying that he had lied when he told the police that Mr. Edwards had hired him. Mr. Edwards had nothing to do with her death, Mr. Wilson said in the affidavit, but he lied to avoid getting the death penalty himself. He was actually in a secret relationship with Ms. Cantrell, and he shot her at her apartment in University City during an argument over his drug addiction, Mr. Wilson said.

When Samuel Hotchkiss, a member of Mr. Edwards’s legal team, notified him over the phone of the commutation Friday afternoon, Mr. Edwards said something to the effect of “Praise the Lord or thank God,” Mr. Hotchkiss said.

Mr. Edwards, who had been transferred to the execution cell on Thursday, was laughing with joy and was calm, Mr. Hotchkiss said.

Mr. Edwards had confessed to hiring someone to kill Ms. Cantrell, but he quickly recanted and argued during his trial that the confession was coerced. But Mr. Edwards, who is black, was convicted and sentenced to death in St. Louis County by a 12-member jury that was all white. The jury composition was brought up in an earlier appeal, which was rejected by the court.

Kent E. Gipson, the lead lawyer representing Mr. Edwards, said that the commutation was unexpected.

“I’ve been doing this a long time,” Mr. Gipson said. “I’ve seen too many bad things happen to be very optimistic. But it’s always good to have a victory.”

Mr. Nixon’s only other death sentence commutation was for Richard Clay in 2011. Mr. Clay had been convicted of committing a for-hire murder, but his lawyers argued that there was evidence pointing to his innocence.

As in Mr. Clay’s case, Mr. Nixon gave no reason for the commutation, even going so far as to say in a statement that he still believed Mr. Edwards was guilty.

“This is a step not taken lightly,” the governor said, “and only after significant consideration of the totality of the circumstances.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 3, 2015, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Missouri Inmate Is Spared Death Sentence.

Missouri Inmate Is Spared Death Sentence,
NYT, OCT. 2, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/03/us/
missouri-inmate-is-spared-death-sentence.html

California Death Penalty,

Struck Down Over Delays,

Faces Next Test

 

AUG. 29, 2015

The New York Times

By ERIK ECKHOL

Whether California’s application of the death penalty is so drawn out and arbitrary that it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment will be argued on Monday before a federal appeals court in Pasadena.

If the lawyers for a condemned man are victorious, the case could bring a reprieve to more than 740 prisoners now on death row at San Quentin State Prison and send legal ripples across the country. Either way, legal experts say, it raises issues about the administration of capital punishment that are likely to reach the Supreme Court over time.

In Monday’s hearing before a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, California officials will seek to overturn a surprise ruling last year by a lower federal court, which declared the state’s “death penalty system” to be unconstitutional.

Hailed by death penalty opponents as a breakthrough and attacked by others as unwise and legally out of line, the decision was issued on July 16, 2014, by Judge Cormac J. Carney of Federal District Court in Santa Ana. It focused not on disparities in the meting out of death sentences in the first place — the more familiar charge — but on the decades of tangled and prolonged reviews that follow and the rarity of actual executions.

In a scathing account of what he called a dysfunctional system, Judge Carney noted that of the more than 900 people who had been sentenced to death in California since 1978, when the current legal structure was established, only 13 had been executed.

Citing growing delays in a judicial review process that can take 25 years or more, far above the national norm, Judge Carney said death sentences had been transformed, in effect, into “life in prison, with the remote possibility of death.”

The “random few” who are put to death, he said, “will have languished for so long on death row that their execution will serve no retributive or deterrent purpose and will be arbitrary.”

Judge Carney ruled on the appeal of Ernest Dewayne Jones, who was condemned to die in 1995 for a murder and rape and made a last-ditch plea to a federal court after his appeals to the California Supreme Court had been denied. The judge vacated Mr. Jones’s death sentence as he declared California’s capital-punishment process to be generally unconstitutional.

The decision was a stunning one, and California officials have sharply challenged it on both procedure and substance. They say it was illegitimate because Mr. Jones’s arguments about the arbitrariness of the review system — issues going beyond the long delays alone — had not first been considered in the California courts, as required.

Beyond that, according to the brief from the state’s attorney general, Kamala D. Harris, a Democrat, the delays and rarity of executions do not reflect random quirks. Rather, it says, they are a product of California’s effort to be scrupulously fair, ensuring that condemned prisoners have high-quality lawyers and every opportunity to question the legality of their sentences.

California legislators have required such exhaustive reviews and procedures as “an important safeguard against arbitrariness and caprice,” the state holds, quoting from a 1976 Supreme Court decision.

In a plebiscite in 2012, California voters affirmed the death penalty by a narrow margin, with 52 percent voting to keep it and 48 percent voting to replace it with life in prison without parole.

California inmates normally wait three to five years just for the appointment of a qualified defense lawyer, a delay that may be repeated as convicts pursue two successive state appeals and then a federal one. Beyond the prolonged process of reviewing death sentences, California has had a de facto moratorium on executions since 2006 because of disputes over the method of lethal injection.

The questions of arbitrariness and extreme delay that are raised by the Jones case are important and may well gain purchase in the courts, said Eric M. Freedman, a professor of constitutional law and death penalty expert at Hofstra University.

“But that does not necessarily mean that this particular litigation will be the vehicle by which the courts resolve these issues,” he added, noting that procedural or other questions could lead the appeals panel to overrule the Jones decision.

The arguments made by Mr. Jones’s lawyers — and echoed by Judge Carney — are similar in part to those made in June by Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the Supreme Court. In a sweeping dissent, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Breyer went beyond the lethal-injection issue at hand to ask whether the death penalty was so marred by unreliable decisions, arbitrary application and delays that it should be abolished.

But conservative justices responded that death penalty opponents, in their zeal to erect obstacles to executions, were responsible for inordinate delays and unpredictability.

If the Ninth Circuit and even the Supreme Court should uphold Judge Carney’s ruling, this would not necessarily cause the death penalty to unravel nationwide, said Douglas A. Berman, an expert on criminal law at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law.

Judge Carney’s decision turned on details specific to California, and with its high number of condemned prisoners and very low pace of executions, the state is in a class by itself, Mr. Berman said. Still, he added, a similar critique might succeed in a few other states, including Pennsylvania and Florida.

Given the deep divisions within California over the death penalty, Mr. Berman added, the state may, in an odd way that has nothing to do with constitutional principles, be well served by the status quo.

“Voters, and perhaps the executive branch, too, are not that troubled with a system that has lots of death sentences and few executions,” Mr. Berman said.
 

A version of this article appears in print on August 30, 2015, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Death Row Delays, Ruled Unconstitutional in California, Face Appellate Test.

California Death Penalty, Struck Down Over Delays,
Faces Next Test,
NYT, AUGUST 20, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/us/
california-death-penalty-struck-down-over-delays-faces-next-test.html

Freedom, Finally,

After a Life in Prison

AUG. 21, 2015

The New York Times

SundayReview

By AMY LINN

WHEN she was 15 years old, Paula Cooper and three high school classmates in Gary, Ind., decided to cut school and steal some money to play games at a local arcade. They drank some cheap wine, smoked some pot and walked to the nearby home of a 78-year-old Bible teacher, Ruth Pelke. They figured she might have a jar of money somewhere.

The teenagers cajoled their way inside by telling Ms. Pelke that they were interested in Bible lessons. Once there, one of them hit her with a vase. Ms. Cooper stabbed Ms. Pelke 33 times with a butcher knife.

The others stood watch, joined in the slaying or searched for cash. They left with $10 and took a joy ride in Ms. Pelke’s old Plymouth.

Three girls received long prison sentences. Ms. Cooper pleaded guilty to murder and in 1986 was sentenced to die in the electric chair, becoming the youngest death-row inmate in Indiana history.

What followed was extraordinary. Bill Pelke, the Bible teacher’s grandson, forgave Ms. Cooper for killing his beloved grandmother, who never would have wanted an execution, he said. Mr. Pelke started a sweeping campaign to spare Ms. Cooper’s life, wrote to her faithfully and visited her behind bars.

“She told me how truly sorry she was for what she’d done,” said Mr. Pelke, who is the president of Journey of Hope: From Violence to Healing, an anti-death-penalty group he co-founded.

More than two million people, most of them in Europe, signed petitions on behalf of Ms. Cooper; protesters in Italy began a Paula Cooper crusade, complete with T-shirts bearing her mug shot. The pope made a plea for clemency.

In 1989, Indiana’s Supreme Court commuted Ms. Cooper’s sentence to 60 years in prison. She earned a bachelor’s degree, trained assistance dogs for the disabled, tutored inmates and ran the prison kitchen. In June 2013, after spending her adult life as inmate No. 864800, she walked out of prison, released decades early because of her good behavior.

She didn’t know how to use the Internet. She constantly got lost; in prison, there’s no need to learn directions because someone always tells you where to go. “I didn’t know how to use an A.T.M. card — anything,” she said.

She nevertheless got a job cooking hamburgers at Five Guys and soon became a manager. She got engaged and moved into an apartment with her fiancé. She won her dream job as a legal assistant in the Indiana federal community defender’s office, led by her longtime friend and defense attorney, Monica Foster, the chief federal defender.

“You’ve got to have hope,” Ms. Cooper told me. “If you give it up, you’re never going to make it.”

On May 26, some two years after her release, Ms. Cooper committed suicide. She would have turned 46 this month.

I was one of the few journalists to talk to Ms. Cooper post-prison and was the last to speak with her, in a call a month before her death.

I’d been planning a trip to Indianapolis to finally meet her for a story about teenagers on death row who transformed themselves. If anyone was proof that redemption was possible, it was Ms. Cooper.

She asked me to wait a little. “My life is quiet right now, and that’s how I like it. Once people find out who I am, they all have an opinion about me because of what I did. They start seeing me as a monster.”

Ms. Cooper had been severely depressed since childhood, her older sister, Rhonda LaBroi, told me. Ms. LaBroi begged her to get counseling, but after all the time in prison, Ms. Cooper couldn’t trust anyone. Ms. LaBroi said that in a suicide note, her sister said that “she wanted to tell people suffering from mental illness not to go down that road, not to commit suicide, to reach out any way they could.”

Ms. Cooper’s history was daunting. Her mother tried to commit suicide and kill Ms. Cooper and Ms. LaBroi when they were young. She put the girls in the car with her and ran the engine in a closed garage. Ms. Cooper’s father, Herman, now deceased, issued daily beatings, often with an extension cord, Ms. LaBroi said.

School officials, police and social workers wouldn’t intervene. “We begged them to help and they never did,” she told me.

In prison, the torment continued At the Indiana Women’s Prison, her first home, “some of the guards lived to make us miserable,” Ms. Cooper said. In her 20s she spent three straight years in solitary confinement, heaping new scars on top of old. Leading causes of criminality are chronic trauma, neglect or abuse, said Ms. Foster, a public defender for three decades. “The prison system does absolutely nothing to respond to that.”

“Paula showed the incredible possibilities in people,” Ms. Foster said. “She’d been put down, put down, put down, sentenced to death, did 28 years, and she came out and did great — she turned everything around. In the end it wasn’t enough, because no one gave her the help she deserved.”

“It’s a complete tragedy,” Ms. Foster told me after her death.

Mental health care in prison is mostly a pill in a paper cup. Ms. Cooper herself was briefly on antidepressants, she told her sister. No one mandated follow-up treatment for “re-entry,” an apt term considering how much it must feel like dropping from outer space. “Nobody helps because people don’t see us as human beings,” Ms. Cooper said.

Basic reforms could have made the difference for her, and putting them in place could help hundreds of thousands of other offenders, according to everyone from judges and psychiatrists to advocates. This isn’t about pampering. The reforms would cut costs by reducing recidivism.

We need to provide mental health assessments; adequate counseling and treatment programs; rehabilitation; and appropriate medication, as opposed to just sedatives. We should make outpatient treatment a condition of parole, and expand the use of specialized mental health “re-entry courts,” which offer intensive guidance and support.

WHATEVER demons Ms. Cooper fought with, she hid them well. “She’s thriving,” Ms. Foster told me a month before Ms. Cooper’s death. “She’s full of joy.”

She learned to shop for food, and drive (badly). She was the cheerful, patient voice on the phone for terrified and lonely law office clients. She spoke at two colleges to “give back to the community.” She tried everything she could to help a mentally ill homeless man in her neighborhood.

But she felt mentally ill herself, she told her sister, who said: “Bill Pelke forgave her, but she couldn’t forgive herself. She said she felt like she didn’t deserve to live.”

There are lots of Paula Coopers in the country. Prisons release more than 650,000 inmates every year. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, some 70 percent of incarcerated women in state prisons suffer from mental health problems.

Ms. Cooper needed help to survive her despair over the crime. Her sister said she thought about it every day. When her victim’s grandson visited her in prison, he forgave her, and hugged her. “You’ve taken a burden off me,” she told him. In the end, there were too many others to lift.
 

A journalist who received a 2015 Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship to write about teenagers who were on death row.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 23, 2015, on page SR7 of the National edition with the headline: Freedom, Finally, After a Life in Prison.

Freedom, Finally, After a Life in Prison,
NYT, AUGUST 21, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/opinion/sunday/
freedom-finally-after-a-life-in-prison.html

Talking About the Death Penalty,

Court to Court

AUG. 20, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Contributing Op-Ed Writer

Linda Greenhouse

The Connecticut Supreme Court could have taken an easy route to finding the state’s death penalty unconstitutional in the decision it issued last week. The State Legislature repealed the death penalty in 2012, but it made the repeal prospective, leaving 11 men on death row. The reason for the prospective-only repeal was obvious to all: Two of the death-row inmates, Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes, had committed a horrific home-invasion triple murder that shocked the state in 2007, and the prospect of barring their execution was unpalatable to Connecticut politicians and many members of the public.

As a matter of constitutional doctrine, the State Supreme Court might simply have found the distinction between those who committed murder before and after the repeal date of April 25, 2012, to be arbitrary — a violation of due process, equal protection or both. Taking the repeal law, signed by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, to embody the collective judgment of the people’s elected representatives that capital punishment is no longer an appropriate tool of criminal justice in Connecticut, on what basis could the state apply the death penalty to one class of murderers and spare another, with the two groups separated only by the date of offense?

The 92-page majority opinion in Connecticut v. Santiago, written by Justice Richard N. Palmer for four of the court’s seven justices, was much more ambitious than that, however, and in its ambition lies its significance.

On hearing that the Connecticut Supreme Court had invalidated the state’s death penalty, many people probably shrugged and thought, “O.K., that’s one little blue state that hardly ever executed anyone (a single execution in the past 55 years, if you’re counting) and that was already never going to add anyone new to death row. How important can this decision be?”

That was, frankly, my thought as well, and I picked up the decision — more than 200 pages, including concurring and dissenting opinions — with some reluctance and a sense of obligation. (My apartment building is across the street from the New Haven courthouse where crowds, gathered for the consecutive trials in the home-invasion murders, blocked the sidewalks for weeks in 2010 and 2011.) But I turned the pages with mounting excitement. In the breadth of its perspective on the history and current problematic state of the death penalty, in its cleareyed dissection of the irreconcilable conflict at the heart of modern death-penalty jurisprudence, the Connecticut Supreme Court not only produced an important decision for its own jurisdiction; but it addressed the United States Supreme Court frankly and directly. The decision engages the Supreme Court at a crucial moment of mounting unease, within the court and outside it, with the death penalty’s trajectory over the nearly four decades since the court permitted states to resume executions.

Next year marks the 40th anniversary of Gregg v. Georgia and the four other Supreme Court decisions that reviewed the new generation of laws the states enacted in an effort to comply with the 1972 decision that had invalidated all existing death-penalty laws. “These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual,” Justice Potter Stewart famously wrote in a concurring opinion in the 1972 case Furman v. Georgia. The new laws that the Supreme Court upheld were supposed to avoid just such arbitrariness by limiting those defendants deemed eligible for the death penalty and by channeling juries’ discretion over when to impose it.

The problem, as the Connecticut Supreme Court demonstrates, is that it hasn’t worked. Of some 200 cases in the state that might have been charged as capital murder between 1973 and 2007, prosecutors sought the death penalty in some 130 and obtained death sentences in 12. “The selection of which offenders live and which offenders die appears to be inescapably tainted by caprice and bias,” the court said, pointing to “an inherent conflict in the requirements that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, as interpreted by the United States Supreme Court, imposes on any capital sentencing scheme.”

On the one hand, the death penalty can’t be automatic, but has to result from specific findings about the crime and the defendant through a process that relies on specifically identified “aggravating factors.” That’s the effort to channel discretion and treat like cases alike. On the other hand, the jury must have absolute discretion to consider any “mitigating factors” that it deems relevant. That’s the effort to treat each defendant as an individual. The United States Supreme Court deems both efforts as constitutionally essential. But to quote from the Connecticut opinion:

“The question is whether this individualized sentencing requirement inevitably allows in through the back door the same sorts of caprice and freakishness that the court sought to exclude in Furman, or, worse, whether individualized sentencing necessarily opens the door to racial and ethnic discrimination in capital sentencing. In other words, is it ever possible to eliminate arbitrary and discriminatory application of capital punishment through a more precise and restrictive definition of capital crimes if prosecutors always remain free not to seek the death penalty for a particular defendant, and juries not to impose it, for any reason whatsoever? We do not believe that it is.”

Six weeks earlier, Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, dissenting from the decision that rejected a challenge to Oklahoma’s lethal-injection protocol, identified another inherent contradiction. Deploring lengthy delays that “both aggravate the cruelty of the death penalty and undermine its jurisprudential rationale” (the average delay between sentencing and execution is now more than 17 years, they noted), the justices said that the “special need for reliability and fairness in capital cases” means that substantial delay is inevitable. Justice Breyer, who wrote the 42-page dissenting opinion that Justice Ginsburg joined, said this: “In this world, or at least in this nation, we can have a death penalty that at least arguably serves legitimate penological purposes or we can have a procedural system that at least arguably seeks reliability and fairness in the death penalty’s application. We cannot have both.”

The two justices didn’t flatly declare a belief that the death penalty is unconstitutional, saying rather that it was “highly likely” to violate the Eighth Amendment; the court, they said, should invite full briefing on that question “rather than try to patch up the death penalty’s legal wounds one at a time.”

Like the Connecticut justices, these two justices went beyond the confines of the case before them to confront the deeper questions. (Along with Justice Elena Kagan, Justices Breyer and Ginsburg also signed Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion, which more conventionally addressed the majority’s holding on lethal injection.) The Connecticut decision and the Breyer-Ginsburg dissent were meant for wider audiences, and to a notable degree, each found an audience in the other. The Connecticut justices cited Justice Breyer’s dissent. I have no idea whether Justice Breyer knew about the Connecticut case, which had been pending for more than two years by the time the United States Supreme Court issued its lethal injection decision, Glossip v. Gross, on June 29. (I found no mention of the Connecticut case in the briefs the court received.) But Justice Breyer did cite the same statistical evidence in the same study of the Connecticut death penalty that the Connecticut justices used, concluding that “such studies indicate that the factors that most clearly ought to affect application of the death penalty — namely, comparative egregiousness of the crime — often do not.”

Were the Connecticut justices emboldened by Justice Breyer’s invitation to grapple with the death penalty itself? Maybe they were; coming late in what by all signs was a brutally contentious process within the Connecticut Supreme Court, the Breyer dissent must have appeared to the majority justices as a gift from on high, an open door. And clearly Justices Breyer and Ginsburg mean to spur hard thinking about the death penalty by every judge in the country.

And what about the Supreme Court itself? The last member of the court to renounce the death penalty was Justice John Paul Stevens, who retired in 2010. In the ensuing five years of silence, executions plummeted to a 20-year low (35 last year, compared with a high of 98 in 1999) and public approval of the death penalty, at 56 percent earlier this year, was the lowest in 40 years. Seven states carried out executions last year, compared with 20 in 1999. It’s no exaggeration to say that there is a widespread de facto moratorium in place, even in most of the 31 states that still have the death penalty on their books. (In four of those states — Washington, Oregon, Colorado and Pennsylvania — governors have imposed an actual moratorium.)

Although a Supreme Court decision abolishing the death penalty wouldn’t shock much of the country, it’s not easy to imagine the John G. Roberts Jr. court taking that step. If the question, as it is so often, is “what would Justice Kennedy do?” it’s worth noting that he signed neither of the dissenting opinions in the lethal injection case. He silently joined the majority opinion of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. — the justice who during the oral argument, in one of the uglier performances that I can recall on the Supreme Court bench, asked the lawyer for the Oklahoma death-row inmates whether it was “appropriate for the judiciary to countenance what amounts to a guerrilla war against the death penalty.” On the other hand, Justice Kennedy has become an outspoken advocate for reform of the criminal justice system, with a recent focus on solitary confinement.

I’m not counting the days, or the Supreme Court terms, until the court declares the death penalty unconstitutional. But from two courts, the highest in the land and the highest court of one of the smallest states, a fruitful conversation emerged this summer that will inevitably spread, gain momentum and, in the foreseeable if not immediate future, lead the Supreme Court to take the step that I think a majority of today’s justices know is the right one.

Talking About the Death Penalty, Court to Court,
NYT, AUGUST 20, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/20/opinion/
talking-about-the-death-penalty-court-to-court.html

Connecticut Death Penalty Ruling

Stirs Painful Memories

of 3 Grisly Killings

AUG. 14, 2015

The New York Times

By NICHOLAS CASEY

CHESHIRE, Conn. — Celine Bonilla was only 11 when she looked out her first-floor window and saw police officers pinning a man down on her front lawn. It was 2007, and that man and an accomplice had just killed two of her friends and their mother, dousing them with gasoline and burning them alive in their home in what became known as one of the grisliest crimes in Connecticut history.

Yet Ms. Bonilla, now an 18-year-old nursing student, said she opposed the death penalty — even for the two men who murdered her neighbors that morning. “They deserve to be in jail,” she said, explaining that she believed executions were cruel and unusual.

The Connecticut Supreme Court expressed a similar opinion on Thursday when it struck down the state’s death penalty law in its entirety, sparing the lives of 11 prisoners, including the two men, Steven J. Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, who were convicted in the killings here.

While a state law enacted in 2012 had prohibited the imposition of any new death penalty sentences in Connecticut, the court went further with its 4-to-3 decision this week, saying that even those already on death row before the law’s passage could not be executed because the punishment “no longer comports with contemporary standards of decency.”

In this suburban town near New Haven, the ruling brought back painful memories of a crime that began as a home invasion robbery and ended with the deaths of Jennifer Hawke-Petit, 48, and her daughters, Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11. The girls’ father, Dr. William A. Petit Jr., a well-known endocrinologist, was bludgeoned by Mr. Hayes and Mr. Komisarjevsky, but managed to escape to a neighbor’s home.

The murders in the upper-class enclave — Cheshire still tops many lists of the country’s safest communities — added a new dimension to a long, unresolved debate over how to punish the most violent criminals. The last polling on the issue in the state, by Quinnipiac University in 2012 after the state had abolished new death sentences, showed Connecticut residents split evenly on whether convicted murderers should be put to death or sentenced to life without parole.

Among those who still support the death penalty for the Cheshire killers is Cindy Hawke-Renn, the 54-year-old sister of Ms. Hawke-Petit. Ms. Hawke-Renn, who lives in North Carolina and works at a preschool, said on Friday that she was angry that the men who murdered her sister and nieces got three meals a day from the state.

She said she had long doubted that Mr. Hayes and Mr. Komisarjevsky would be executed, especially once the state ended the death penalty for new cases. “I never thought these men would be put to death,” Ms. Hawke-Renn said.

Dr. Petit did not respond to a request for comment, but in a statement provided by Ms. Hawke-Renn, he condemned the court’s decision. He said he believed the court had overstepped its powers and urged it to give greater consideration to the “emotional impact, particularly on victims and their loved ones” that death penalty cases generate.

Mr. Hayes and Mr. Komisarjevsky had stalked the victims the night before breaking into their house, according to prosecutors. They had seen Ms. Hawke-Petit and Michaela at a grocery store and then entered their home at 3 a.m., after the family had gone to bed.

First, the men clubbed Mr. Petit with a baseball bat and tied him up in the basement. Later, as Mr. Komisarjevsky held the daughters hostage, Mr. Hayes forced Ms. Hawke-Petit to go to the bank and withdraw $15,000.

Bank employees, tipped off by Ms. Hawke-Petit, called the police, who arrived around the time Mr. Petit escaped. Ms. Hawke-Petit and her daughters died as the men tried to flee after tying them up and setting fire to the home.

Officers caught the men on Ms. Bonilla’s lawn after they crashed a car into a police roadblock. “He looked me in the eyes,” she said of Mr. Hayes, “and I’ll always remember it.”

Ms. Bonilla and other Cheshire residents recalled how the neighborhood changed in the years that followed, becoming a place where families ritually locked their doors at night, bought dogs for protection and installed home-security systems. A memorial garden grows on the empty lot where the Petit home once stood. A small plaque says, “Three Angels.”

Michael Milone, Cheshire’s town manager for the last 15 years, would not say whether he thought the death penalty was right or wrong. But he said that even if some people in Connecticut had changed their opinion about capital punishment, he believed support for it had grown after the killings.

“That’s not being reflected in the court’s decision,” he said.

Maureen Burns, a 59-year-old insurance claims adjuster, was among those who once supported the death penalty. She bought her house across from the remains of the Petit family’s home shortly after the murders. She recalled regular police patrols in front of her yard and crowds of reporters asking for her opinions when Mr. Hayes and Mr. Komisarjevsky went on trial.

But Ms. Burns said her daughter, a lawyer, recently persuaded her to become skeptical of capital punishment, arguing that the process of execution was long and costly to the state.

“At the end of the day, they can last as long on death row as they would in prison,” she said. “So what’s the point?”

A version of this article appears in print on August 15, 2015, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Death Penalty Decision Stirs Painful Memories of Three Grisly Killings.

Connecticut Death Penalty Ruling Stirs Painful Memories of 3 Grisly Killings,
NYT, AUGUST 14, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/15/nyregion/
connecticut-death-penalty-ruling-stirs-painful-memories-of-3-grisly-killings.html

Connecticut Death Penalty Law

Is Unconstitutional, Court Rules

AUG. 13, 2015

The New York Times

By BENJAMIN MUELLER

and JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr

Casting the death penalty as an outdated tool of justice at odds with today’s societal values, Connecticut’s highest court on Thursday spared the lives of 11 men on death row by ruling that capital punishment violated the State Constitution.

The court ruled, 4 to 3, that a 2012 law abolishing capital punishment must be applied to the 11 inmates facing execution for offenses they committed before the measure took effect. But the decision went well beyond the narrow question of whether those men could be executed, declaring that the death penalty, in the modern age, met the definition of cruel and unusual punishment.

“We are persuaded that, following its prospective abolition, this state’s death penalty no longer comports with contemporary standards of decency and no longer serves any legitimate penological purpose,” Justice Richard Palmer of the State Supreme Court wrote for the majority.

In a blistering dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Chase T. Rogers said the majority’s decision overstated the societal aversion to the death penalty, calling the ruling “a house of cards, falling under the slightest breath of scrutiny.”

Opponents of the death penalty said the decision would quite likely influence high courts in other states, among them Colorado and Washington, where capital punishment has recently been challenged under the theory that society’s mores have evolved, transforming what was once an acceptable step into an unconstitutional punishment.

Though the ruling has no legal impact beyond Connecticut, the United States Supreme Court often uses such opinions as guides to determine whether societal views have shifted, experts on the death penalty said on Thursday. In the past, state court rulings on issues such as the legality of sodomy laws and the execution of mentally disabled people have paved the way for landmark Supreme Court rulings.

“This decision is just one more nail in the coffin of the death penalty,” said Eric M. Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University who specializes in death penalty cases. “If you have a strong trend in the states rejecting a practice, that influences the Supreme Court.”

Justice Palmer said that the 2012 state law abolishing the death penalty for people convicted of future crimes but permitting the execution of inmates who committed earlier crimes had already marked the “death knell” of a practice long out of step with moral feelings in the Northeast.

The court said it would be “cruel and unusual” to keep anyone on death row in a state that had “determined that the machinery of death is irreparable or, at the least, unbecoming to a civilized modern state.”

The decision went further still, saying the practice was ineffective, rarely imposed and tainted by “racial, ethnic and socio-economic biases.” Death penalty experts said that reasoning could be cited as a precedent in New Mexico, which kept two men on death row after abolishing capital punishment in 2009.

The ruling was seen by legal experts as the inevitable end to an emotional debate over the death penalty for Connecticut, which has executed only one inmate in the last 50 years. Intense political pressure that followed the grisly killing of a woman and her two daughters during a home invasion in 2007 in Cheshire moved the state to keep inmates on death row who had committed crimes before the 2012 law was enacted.

With its decision on Thursday, “the Supreme Court has brought this to its logical conclusion and made it a total abolition,” said Lawrence B. Goodheart, a history professor at the University of Connecticut whose study of the death penalty was cited by Justice Palmer.

The ruling, Professor Goodheart added, validated the political strategy employed by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, a Democrat who campaigned in 2010 on a platform of abolishing the death penalty but signed a more limited bill amid anger over the Cheshire case.

The ruling, which was met with outrage by the families of victims whose killers are on death row, came in response to an appeal by Eduardo Santiago. He was facing resentencing and the possibility of lethal injection for fatally shooting Joseph Niwinski in the head as he slept in West Hartford in 2000.

Mr. Niwinski’s brother, Francis Niwinski Jr., said he did not regard death as a cruel punishment for the convicted killer.

“He’s a worthless piece of garbage,” Mr. Niwinski said. “Now all of a sudden they change the laws when that court already sentenced him. That’s not justice. That’s unfair justice to us.”

Marybelle Hawke, 93, whose daughter Jennifer Hawke-Petit was killed in the Cheshire murders, said the state had abandoned her family. “I just can’t begin to believe they would do that,” she said. “The death penalty represents for the general public the capability of doing something that would make life more fair.”

Connecticut is among 19 states that do not impose the death penalty. That number has grown in recent years as advocates argued that the punishment was costly and overwhelmingly applied to black and poor defendants.

Justice Palmer said that trend was even more pronounced in Connecticut, whose rate of executions was among the lowest in the country. Its execution in 2005 of Michael Ross, a convicted serial killer, came only after Mr. Ross voluntarily abandoned his right to appeal. Before that, the state had not killed an inmate since 1960, a history that legal experts said made it unlikely that any of the 11 men who remained on death row would have ever been put to death.

Connecticut officials said they were studying what steps would follow, but they expected the death sentences to revert to sentences of life without parole.

Citing “secularization, evolving moral standards, new constitutional and procedural protections, and the availability of incarceration as a viable alternative to execution,” the decision said public acceptance of the death penalty had eroded.

The decision also said the death penalty failed to serve a purpose in fighting crime, given that long delays in carrying out executions drained its value as a deterrent, and that racial biases and the possibility of error undermined its capacity to satisfy retribution.

The justices still had to grapple with why state lawmakers made exceptions for people already on death row when they did away with capital punishment three years ago. In her dissent, Chief Justice Rogers argued that “the reason for the prospective repeal was not that a majority of legislators found the death penalty morally repugnant even for the worst crimes.” Instead, she wrote, “they had determined that the death penalty simply had become impracticable.”

The majority rejected that reasoning, finding that the prospective repeal marked the logical endpoint of a “steady, inexorable devolution in the popularity and legitimacy of the death penalty.”

Justice Palmer wrote that while the 2012 law “reflects the intent of the legislature that capital punishment shall die with a whimper, not with a bang, its death knell has been rung nonetheless.”

The decision carried to completion Mr. Malloy’s politically risky position of standing by his promise to abolish the death penalty even as support for the practice — fueled by the killing of Ms. Hawke-Petit and her two daughters — was rising.

Abolition was politically unfeasible in 2012, Professor Goodheart said, but the governor’s decision to sign the more limited bill began a process that culminated in the ruling on Thursday.

In a statement released after the decision, Mr. Malloy reflected on the state’s long path from imposing the death penalty only rarely, to ending it.

“Today is a somber day, where our focus should not be on the 11 men sitting on death row but with their victims and those surviving families members,” he said. “My thoughts and prayers are with them during what must be a difficult day.”

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on August 14, 2015,
on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Connecticut Death Penalty Law Is Unconstitutional.

Connecticut Death Penalty Law Is Unconstitutional, Court Rules,
NYT,
AUGUST 13, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/nyregion/
connecticut-death-penalty-law-is-unconstitutional-court-rules.html